The present invention relates generally to the field of currency handling systems and, more particularly, to a multi-pocket currency handling system for discriminating, authenticating, and/or counting currency bills.
A variety of techniques and apparatuses have been used to satisfy the requirements of automated currency handling machines. As businesses and banks grow, these businesses are experiencing a greater volume of paper currency. These businesses are continually requiring not only that their currency be processed more quickly but, also, processed with more options in a less expensive manner. At the upper end of sophistication in this area of technology are machines that are capable of rapidly identifying, discriminating, and counting multiple currency denominations and then delivering the sorted currency bills into a multitude of output compartments. Many of these high end machines are extremely large and expensive such that they are commonly found only in large institutions. These machines are not readily available to businesses which have monetary and space budgets, but still have the need to process large volumes of currency. Other high end currency handling machines require their own climate controlled environment which may place even greater strains on businesses having monetary and space budgets.
Currency handling machines typically employ magnetic sensing or optical sensing for denominating and authenticating currency bills. The results of these processes determines to which output compartment a particular bill is delivered to in a currency handling device having multiple output receptacles. For example, ten dollar denominations may be delivered to one output compartment and twenty dollar denominations to another, while bills which fail the authentication test are delivered to a third output compartment. Unfortunately, many prior art devices only have one output compartment which can be appropriately called a reject pocket. Accordingly, in those cases, the reject pocket may have to accommodate those bills which fail a denomination test or authentication test. As a result, different types of xe2x80x9crejectxe2x80x9d bills are stacked upon one another in the same output compartment leaving the operator unknowing as to which of those bills failed which tests.
Many prior art large volume currency handling devices which positively transport the currency bills through the device are susceptible to becoming jammed. And many of these machines are difficult to un-jam because the operator must physically remove the jammed bill or bills from the device. If necessary, the operator can sometimes manipulate a hand-crank to manually jog the device to remove the bills. Then, the operator must manually turn the hand crank to flush out all the bills from within the system before the batch can be reprocessed. Further compounding the problem in a bill jam situation is that many prior art devices are not equipped to detect the presence of a bill jam. In such a situation, the device continues to operate until the bills pile up and the bill jam is so severe that the device is physically forced to halt. This situation can cause physical damage to both the machine and the bills.
Often, a bill jam ruins the integrity of the count and/or valuation of the currency bills requiring that the entire batch, including those bill already processed into holding and/or storage areas, be reprocessed. Bills need to be reprocessed because prior art devices do not maintain several running totals of bills as bills pass various points within the device. Removing bills from the holding areas and/or storage areas is a time consuming process. For example, a prior device may only count the bills as they are transported through an evaluation region of the currency handing machine. Bills exiting the evaluation region are included in the totals regardless of whether they are involved in bill jams or are successfully transported to an output receptacle. Therefore, when a bill jam occurs those bills involved in the bill jam as well as those bills already transported to the storage areas and/or storage areas have to be reprocessed.
A method and apparatus for handling bill jams within a currency processing device is provided. The device includes a transport mechanism adapted to transport bills along a transport path, one at a time, from the input receptacle past an evaluation unit into a plurality of output receptacles. At least one of the output receptacles includes a holding area and a storage area. A plurality of bill passage sensors are sequentially disposed along the transport path that are adapted to detect the passage of a bill as each bill is transported past each sensor. An encoder is adapted to produce an encoder count for each incremental movement of the transport mechanism. A controller counts the total number of bills transported into each of the holding areas and the total number of bills moved from a holding area to a corresponding storage area after a predetermined number of bills have been transported into the holding area. The controller tracks the movement of each of the bills along the transport path into each of the holding areas with the plurality of bill passage sensors. The presence of a bill jam is detected when a bill is not transported past one of the plurality of bill passage sensors within a requisite number of encoder counts. The operation of the transport mechanism is suspended upon detection of a bill jam. The bills from each of the holding areas are moved to the corresponding storage areas upon suspension of the operation of the transport mechanism. Remaining bills are then flushed from the transport path after moving the bills from each of the holding areas to the corresponding storage areas upon suspension of the operation of the transport mechanism.